


These Shores Shall Swarm

by Figure_of_Dismay



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: 1850s, Chief Leschi, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fake Marriage, Mutual Caretaking, Pacific Northwest, Quiemuth, Rufus Carlin - Freeform, Sharing a Bed, Time Travel, but not in large quantities, camping in the past, grudging allies to lovers, the Medicine Creek Treaty, wyatt logan - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 01:35:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14801850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: Flynn has gone to fledgling Washington State in 1854 to get involved in the Medicine Creek Treaty, and the subsequent Puget Sound Indian Wars, and to go after a Rittenhouse Military Governor Stevens. Lucy and the gang chased him down to try and prevent him from making a mess. With Rufus and Wyatt gone off to get reinforcements, Lucy is left with Flynn in a ramshackle settler town, pretending to be the newly arrived wife he'd sent for.It's a strange, and strangely intimate truce. It's also the first time that Lucy and Flynn have spent an extended amount of time alone together since the David and John Rittenhouse debacle. Set in a Season 1, specific timeframe unspecified but at the very least it's after 1.11.Ignores the Emma issue entirely





	These Shores Shall Swarm

**Author's Note:**

> I've been doing research to make this fic happen. It's local history to me, and Leschi and Quiemuth are essentially relatives of my ancestors, but that doesn't mean that I've automatically got every detail correct. Obviously this is a work of fiction, and some details have been/will be changed to heighten the drama or to fit the plot (Rittenhouse) or to help with a sense of poetic alignment. 
> 
> Please trust that I approach these issues with respect, and with the sense that fictionalizing their lives fits with a proud storytelling tradition. 
> 
> The title of this fic comes from the nearly entirely apocryphal "1854 Chief Seattle Speech"
> 
> The characters you may recognize are not mine, or are fictionalized historical figures, which are also not mine. No offense or infringement is intended.
> 
> Rating is a present assessment, and may go up a notch later.  
> I expect this story to be somewhere around 5 parts.

There’s a few things she’s learned since she became a time traveller. The first is that Garcia Flynn has an able strategic mind, of the kind that the best military commanders, or the most able heist crew leaders would be proud. He’s always just ahead, or more than just, bounds ahead of them, with further moves mapped out and waiting, to all appearances, for weeks or months ahead. It can’t just be the journal, no backward looking accounting could be adequate, and the flailing livewire of their own interference -- and she’s learned this, too, the universe is causal, every move spawns changes, or alternate timelines, or cascading alterations -- must have rendered it at least partially inaccurate. 

The second is that the past is much like the present, but darker, more damp, more cold, and with more rank smells. The people are people, their actions human and personal, their concerns are mundane, self-based, ambitious, or petty, and confined to the circumference of their awareness. None of them, save for a few self important men they’ve encountered, see themselves as figures in history, or aware of themselves as indicative of a culture or an era. History, she is learning, does not exist. Not to walk around it, not when you see it up close. It is not a dead thing, not a record or a kind of stasis, or ceremonial procession. The closer you looked, and the more you tried to grasp it, the more it fell into mist and strings of chance and uncontrollable actions that even so a breath of wind could change. 

She is learning, also, about herself. She had begun to see that something cold, unyielding and watchful worked inside her, something with gears that ticked or scales that weighed. It was an element of herself she hadn’t before acknowledged. Sometimes, instead of knowing with her heart, she hesitated, she calculated, she saw the divergent paths between what was right and what was necessary. She has not so far spoken about that divergence, not with Wyatt and Rufus or Jiya, but sometimes she has acted upon it, certitude of necessity overtaking the morally sanctioned. She knows, though, when she meets Flynn on an even ground, when circumstances force them to work in concert, that he sees the same things, the same hierarchy of obligations. He is bound by the same covenant of necessity, he has simply been drawn farther in, and has become acclimated to the soul-scoring demands of warfare. 

**

Now, she and Flynn were trapped together, in this place of mud and mist and evergreen abundance, that is nevertheless frigid and cloud-bound grim. Wyatt and Rufus had ridden off south, in search of outside authorities, and more than anything she wanted to call them back -- though she also wanted more than anything for them to stay away for fear of tension between the three men sparking conflict even earlier and more vicious. They’d made a mistake, they’d become mired. There was nothing that any of them could do that wouldn’t make the situation worse. 

In the new Washington territory there was no infrastructure. There were no roads, not even well defined tracks in most places, some footpaths or deerpaths, or the suggestion of them but no more. The wet climate made the vegetation aggressive, and resistant to signs of human habitation, save for where the white settlers had come and cut and burned and plowed and set their fences. They’ve been staying in the little, ramshackle territorial capital because it boasted the region’s only hotel south of Seattle, but the indigenous settlements were much farther afield, and they’ve gone to visit them often. Or Flynn has gone, by himself, often enough, slipping away with promises of talk and strategy and patience, and of Native social structures that did not on the whole value input from women -- of course she knew he was busy pursuing his own agenda, but this once she felt he may be right, and she doesn’t challenge him -- leaving her to try to navigate town life alone. 

The town was all low, plank sided buildings spaced out along churned up roads of mud, with wooden sidewalks that were half-sinking into mud and todden over with mud making them slippery as ice. Sometimes she thought that she would prefer ice because at least ice didn’t squish. Everything is perpetually damp, the hems of her skirt and petticoats, the wool of her coat, her boots when she takes them off at night. The sheets in the hotel bed were always faintly clammy, as was the cheap cotton curtain that hangs in the window of their room. The knit-lined leather gloves she’d worn fresh from their package in the warehouse have taken on a withered look, and do not do nearly as much to keep her warm as she’d hoped. The rain and the mist, the moisture in the cold air perpetually leeched the warmth right out of her.

The town was ugly, rough, underpopulated, and full of the smell of horses and woodsmoke and cooking fires. It was surrounded by the stumps of huge trees, cut and hauled for lumber, and the remains burned, leaving uncertain, grotesque humps rising from the land. The fingers of the sound curl around the settlement, and the tide ebbed and flowed deeply, leaving wide, shimmering mudflats, odoriferous and teaming with life. Clams, oyster beds, muscles, the monstrous geoduck with it’s miniature geysers, all sought by the sea birds and the Native gatherers in their flat-topped conical hats and their cedar shawls, baskets on their backs. Away from the town, the country is beautiful, thickly wooded, dripping with moss, clotted with huge, tangled salal and blackberry, high growing ferns. Higher tabled meadowlands furred over with waving grasses and wildflower stocks, all died-back and withered with autumnal decay, but still green and thick, not matted down by snowfall. The land everywhere was rolling and hilled, rising sharply away from the waters of the sound, and crazed and split in many wooded places by deep ravines, some harboring streams and wetlands, others simply forest lowland. In the distance, black hills rose, dark ridges of deep woods, and looming over all the benign white peak of Rainier in the distance. The whole of the land gave everywhere overwhelming dual impressions, fecundity and rot, shelter and terrible enclosure, a prehistoric denseness of nature. 

Lucy was raised in suburb of San Francisco, taught in a large university, had lived always in a densely developed region of central California, inured to fog and chill drizzle but not to this superabundance of wet and green and cold and steepness and enclosing dark. Perhaps it was her awareness of history or the odds against them, or the stress, or the poor food and poor sleep, but she had the creeping sense that the land itself was hostile to them, or at least inhospitably indifferent to them. Lucy was also aware that this unease, like suburbanites fearing the indian burial grounds beneath, like settlers in foreign climes fearing what lives in the woods, is the latent invader-fear, that what was taken wrongly, by force and treachery, however long ago, may still one day turn on them, refusing to be owned.

Here in 1854 it was almost Christmas, and on the 26th the Medicine Creek treaty will be signed. Flynn wants to see the treaty fail. He wants to coach the natives to stand and fight, not let the American state take root and begin to form. He said that Stevens is a Rittenhouse man, just as Stevens’ hero Andrew Jackson was, like the current president Pierce most likely was. That Stevens was a favored son with many disciples, indoctrinating many lines of important players out in this wild place under the auspices of the corrupt, outflung branch of Masons, and in the building of the state structure. Flynn conceded that it was likely impossible to prevent the state from being made, the British had already ceded their stake and the territory stood provisionally claimed by the United States, white Seattle had already eaten up the former, prosperous Duwamish settlement which had once occupied the same land. But maybe Rittenhouse could be prevented from forming it’s powerful little viper’s nest, or at least that was Flynn’s plan. And if the Nisqually and their fellow bands would not revolt early, he said that he and his men would jump ahead to the Indian Wars by Puget Sound that were historically known, and arm them and support them, give them strategy. Try and stop, if at all possible, Stevens from illegally declaring martial law and forcing the Natives into holding camps. It was more of Rittenhouse’s doctrine of tyranny, eugenics, and Manifest Destiny, engineered by some of its most fervent believers, which Flynn seemed to feel honor bound to try to stop. 

Lucy worried about retribution for a Native uprising. The US army could roll right over them if provoked. Tribes all over the North American continent were already in historically vulnerable positions, and the communities in the Northwest were settled, peaceable, outnumbered and outgunned. The treaties are already not going to be honored, Flynn had countered. They are already going to revolt, too. It's their homeland, he had said, every man deserves a fair shot at defending the place of his family. 

She had remembered then, watching the intent frown on his face, that Flynn had fought in the little revolutions that had loosed the hold of the socialist powers in Eastern Europe, starting with the breaking up of Yugoslavia in his own homeland when he couldn’t have been more than 16, and then fighting the Russians in Chechnya. He wasn’t a stranger to these concepts. The circumstances were different, though. The Soviet power was crumbling away already during the wars he’d fought, and here in the 1850s the American power was still beginning to rise, not about to be staggered in its tracks by disparate, untrained and inadequately armed tribal nations. 

She knew this, she had tried to say as much, but Flynn refused to hear it. He didn’t shout at her, or threaten her, he didn’t lash out in anger, just became more brusk, more grimly determined. Despite their recent animosity, he didn’t fear for her safety in contradicting him, but she was beginning to see that he was an innate contrarian. The more she argued that what he planned was impossible, the more he closed his ears to her and sets his course into the wind. She had gone quiet on the argument, for the sake of her sanity, for the sake of living together in truce. Rufus and Wyatt will be back soon, they must be on their way now, and then she and Flynn can give up their strange charade. 

**

For three weeks now, they had been living together as man and wife, traipsing around the Sound, living in the sad little Washington Hotel. Lucy had expected an ordeal of fear, snapping and snarling when she got the boys to agree to the harebrained scheme of splitting up and letting her keep an eye on their man. She had forced her way into Flynn’s care, shown up in front of him, insisting. She was spying on his plans, openly, and interrogating his intentions. She had expected confrontation, fireworks of some kind or another. 

Instead it had been strangely peaceable. Not exactly productive, and stilted, like a ritual dance carried out by inexplicable instinct that makes both parties appear ridiculous, and yet not altogether uncomfortable either. Flynn had been courteous, amused, dogmatic, tenacious and withdrawn by turns, but never hostile to her. No, so far, it had been nothing like she’d expected.

**

Flynn had been in the region for some time before Lucy and the boys landed. He was always a bit ahead, always settled in and well connected by the time they arrived. Lucy was beginning to wonder how much more time he had lived, weeks, months of time, all unaccounted for by the calendar years from the date of his birth. Calendar years, she’s learned, didn't mean much after you started to break away from the ordinary flow of time. 

He had been there long enough to forge friendships with many of the native bands, the south west village of the Nisqually, some of the the Lower Cowlitz who had been visiting relatives and invited him to visit their cities by the Columbia, even some of notoriously xenophobic Squaxin. He hadn't been welcomed as far as a seat on a long canoe when the Nisqually band went visiting to the north, but both he and Lucy were allowed to stand by with his friend, the headman Leschi and his family to watch as the honored guests arrived for the potlatch the Nisqually owed in return, to hear the singing and the drumming that seemed to drive the huge-prowed long boats through the waters of the Sound, watching the the long cedar oars of the rowers dig and flash with smooth skill. They were also allowed to come in to the longhouse and watch discreetly among the commoners as the opening ceremony went on, observing the regalia of the visiting dignitaries and their families, the blessing prayers, sung and spoken to the beating of another wide, flat moon of a skin drum. Lucy understood none of it, though Flynn had enough Chinook by then to whisper a rough outline in her ear what was said, what was meant, what they would be allowed to see. 

It was strange but it wasn't primitive, it wasn't the wild wailing and bouncing that came instinctively, unthinkingly to mind when one mentioned ancient native ceremony, it was as precise and thick with meaning as any religious festival. Lucy felt the reverence in her, felt the beat of the drum in every cavity of her body, and felt also the living membrane of community that was alive now around her in this place, surrounded by this diverse and lively array of people, but very soon would begin to die. She tasted the foreknowledge of that death at the back of her throat, and kept having to rub subtly at her eyes. 

A slow, processional dance began, people in richly patterned blanket cloaks and long black shifts and ermine trimmed headdresses making stately shapes and gestures around the fire. Floating white down was blown by some of the dancers out over the assembled crowd. For luck, Flynn told her, if the down landed on you it was a kiss of blessing from the spirits. Lucy watched it float in the dark air, held aloft by the drafts of warmth and firelight like weightless snow. 

They had left before the feasting, the gift giving, the announcements and ceremonials, the sacrificial braggart casting of copper on the fire. They were visitors, not part of the economy and Flynn didn’t want them causing upset by throwing off the numbers. It was December, just over a week from the Solstice, even though it was early in the evening, or perhaps only late in the afternoon, as they made their way back to the town it’s the deepest edge of twilight. A damp hung in the air, somewhere between fog and drizzle. 

Flynn had a lantern and he rode carefully in the lead, checking frequently that she followed behind on her own, small, plodding mare, warning her of difficult places in the path. She’d been in 1854 over a week by then, and this was the third time she’d been on a horse. She’s getting used to the rhythm of it, the command and the trust that’s needed. Still, it was dark and she was cold, and she knew that Flynn knows the way but the wilderness felt huge and watchful around them. They passed from the sparser riverlands to the forest on a narrow but steady track and Lucy watched Flynn’s shoulders on his larger mount ahead of her, his hair, the flashes of his face, his upraised arm all edged in russet light from the lantern.

She kept thinking about the thriving village of people they’d just left. She hadn’t studied the Indigenous people or their treatment very deeply beyond the local tragedies around the Missions in California, as well as the obligatory mentions of Washington, Franklin and the Iroquois, but certainly not in depth about this last wild corner of the country. It hadn’t played a significant role in the syllabi her mother had prepared for her growing up, or in her specializations in school. She’d known all along that she intended to teach, and she’d been shy of intruding on a delicate subject where she had no personal stake. She knew the lists of battles, massacres and treaties, though, and knew that assimilation was coming for the Indigenous people of America, no matter what Flynn had in mind. Inevitability, she had discovered, tasted bitter, and hovered like a malignant shadow which could not be shed.

By the time the trees had thinned and their forest path had met the wider cart track that ran from the town out to the settler farms to the east, the drizzle had stopped. The high, brilliant night sky clear for once, crystalline and still with the wooded hills reaching up to meet it all around them. Their breath, the breath of their horses misted around them. The air smelled of damp earth and clean air, and though Lucy was shivering in her coat, she wasn’t looking forward to going back to the smokey, muddy town and their cramped room, or the listening ears at the restaurant. 

“Flynn, can we stop for a couple minutes?” she called.

“We’re almost back to town. Don’t you want to get back in time for dinner?” 

“My hands are so cold they hurt. I need to take a break and thaw out my fingers,” she said. This was true, she kept trying to clench her fists to keep her circulation going, but her grip was uncertain on the reigns. 

“Alright,” Flynn agreed, patiently enough. “Do you need a hand down?”

She almost turned him down, reflex insisting that she should not ask for help, especially not from someone so strange, with whom she maintained such an awkward truce. On the other hand, she didn’t want to embarrass herself by refusing help and then taking an unnecessary fall. Her limbs were stiff and she was still not used to riding. 

“Fine,” she said, like she was agreeing to his request, not like she was asking for help. 

Flynn alighted easily from his horse and carefully set aside the lantern on a nearby downed log. Then he came and lifted her down, his hands on her waist large and unyielding. He set her neatly on her feet, as though this was a simple, everyday courtesy and then attended to the reigns of her mare. They went to stood close within the circle of lantern’s glow, instinctively almost hudling, as though believe the touch of the light will be the same thing as the warmth of firelight, but all it does is cast their faces with flat gold and brown glints and shadows. The fallen log presented an inviting seat, worn, half collapsed and shrouded with moss for cushioning, but she knew by then that the moss is was good as a sponge for holding rainwater and Lucy had no wish to be even more damp. She stamped her feet instead of sitting, and peeled off her gloves to chafe her hands together.

“This doesn't do much if you're very cold,” said Flynn, miming her hand motions. “Put them on your neck, under your collar if you can.” He mimed this too, as though he was massaging the back of his neck, watching with concern.

Lucy put her gloves in her pocket and sliped her own icy fingers under her coat collar, under the blue silk square she’d taken to wearing to adorn the plain neckline of her dress until they settled against the surprising heat of her own skin. She shivered at the competing sensations but her aching hands begin to warm, tingling.

“I'm sorry, Lucy,” said Flynn, startling her, “I didn't realize how long a trek it was for someone not used to riding. And this weather is no help. I just wanted you to see... I thought you needed to see what they are like, before.”

The chill air creeping into her disarranged collars was beginning to outweigh the warmth in her hands so she put herself in order and crossed her arms instead, tucking her fingers away. She wasn’t sure if it was wise to say to Flynn what she thought of that. She hadn’t feared him since their earliest meetings, not in a personal sense, not in a bodily sense, but sometimes she feared for his rashness, what he could and may do lashing out at the world beyond the furtive circumference of what is between them. She didn’t trust that he could always be objective. 

“Are these people really your priority, Flynn?” she asked, at last. “Because I don’t know if giving the settlers more reason to fear them, giving the US government more reason to crack down on them is doing them a favor.”

“So they should just give up?” asked Flynn. He doesn’t sound angry, this was not an accusation, but there was a strange timber to his voice. “Surrender their rights and their lands and their religions and their hope because maybe the invaders will treat them only exactly as bad as they already did, and not with more viciousness?”

He’s disappointed in her, she realized. She hadn’t lived up to more of his ideals, or maybe to the vision of her from the journal he thinks he knows. This ought to make her angry, annoyed. She should shrug off his judgement of her as entitlement. His angular face was set hard with that very judgement, lamp lit adamantine, his eyes dark and glittering, hard to read. She wasn’t angry. Her skin prickled with the uncomfortable sense of being found wanting. 

“It’s all already happened that way,” she said, carefully level. “They go for the treaty because it was too much of a risk not to. It is still too much of a risk. It was the only workable choice. You know what happens in other places, to other bands of tribes. Do you really want to see something like that provoked here?”

“It’s a useless agreement,” he countered sharply. “With a Rittenhouse man brokering the treaty and an almost certainly Rittenhouse or Rittenhouse controlled man in office in Washington, it was never a deal, it was a scam to make them bow peacefully to the new regime.”

Lucy felt a wave of something claustrophobic and vicious, an emotion she’d never felt with such acuteness until she’d begun these missions and even still could not name. She was charged with an immense responsibility in protecting history or in knowing when she should allow it to be changed, and yet so often when the moment came to protect it, or to change utterly, she felt helpless, ineffective, impotent. Their tasks were vast but their successes were not, were small patches on a great wound. Sometimes when Flynn most wanted to change the past, she least wanted to prevent him, and yet even then all they could do was tinker and hope. She knew that here, on this frontier, they were both right and they were both wrong, but there was very little they could do to change the outcome either way.

Lucy thought again of the drumming, remembered the feeling of it vibrating inside her. She thought of the processional she’d witnessed, the proud, avid, varied faces of the villagers and their guests, their beautiful blanket capes winking with shell buttons, the revenant joy of their singing. She thought also of the research she’d done on Stevens before they’d left home. He was an ambitious, oily troll of a man with a vicious temper and an overwhelming self interest. A gust of bitter wind came at them, like a rising tide rustling and creaking through the wood and then past them, deeper into the dark. The lamp flickered in its glass shade. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, clutching at the crumpled gloves and braced her body not to shiver as she picked mental her way from helpless futility to reasoned argument.

“The implicit threat hanging over these innocent people’s heads isn’t less legitimate because of Rittenhouse’s involvement,” Lucy said at last, strained with impossibility, “It probably just makes the threat more real.”

Flynn stood and looked at her in silent observation for long moments, weighing or deciding, his expression creased with intent. Then he bowed his head and seems to shrug, or shift himself out of the conversation -- confrontation, whichever this had been. He had moved from taut-framed idealism back to the pragmatic realms of the everyday, she could see it in how something in him seemed to unwind. She sighed faintly and resigned herself to the fact that this round of the discussion is over.

“Come on, Lucy,” Flynn said gently, with an encouraging nod in the direction of the horses. “We should get back to town before you catch your death of exposure. A Californian in these woods in the middle of December, that’s not a good thing am I right?”

“Yes, alright, okay,” she says, conceding with grudging respect. She let herself be teased, buoyed by the sheer, giddy absurdity she can recognize all around her. She laughed dryly, marveling. “You’re not exactly wrong. It’s freezing. And we don’t want to be out too late, or who know what the innkeeper will think.” 

She approached her horse the way Flynn has taught her, confidently from a direction she can see. The horse was well trained and docile, and waited patiently for Lucy to climb up, but Lucy hesitated. She glanced at Flynn who was standing by also waiting, watching from a respectful distance to see if she could manage. She compared her pride against the ungainly fatigue in her legs, and reached a swift, sheepish conclusion. “Will you, um... help back up?” she asked, putting out her hand.

“Of course.”


End file.
